As English state capacity grew and the crown faced growing financial constraints at home, colonies became tempting targets. This chapter explores the crown’s attempts to unwind the institutions of contractual imperialism and assert unilateral, direct control over colonies. However, when the crown made these attempts, colonial institutions had taken deep root over decades. The chapter explains why the crown was unable to force its vision of government on the colonies autocratically, and instead pivoted to a negotiated model of governance: Regulatory imperialism.

This chapter focuses on the final decade of the mandate period, which was marked by notable investment in both psychiatric institutions and expertise. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and with partition on the horizon, this chapter traces two developments in particular: the opening of the third and final government mental health hospital at Jaffa in 1944 and the cultivation of expertise within the department of health around wartime trauma and mental health nursing. Far from reflecting any new vision for colonial development on the part of the mandate government, a closer look at each of these developments reveals that investment was driven as much by colonial subjects and crisis as by British design, and built figuratively and literally on the foundations of the past.

Chapter 2 shows how transnational cooperation in Europe led to the ICI’s invention of transcolonial and emulative development in the 1890s. The ICI’s transcolonial development differed from the state-led investment programs of the 1930s but resembled the functional governance famous among the UN development agencies in the 1960s. For utilitarian, racist, and ethical reasons, tropical hygienists, free-trade capitalists, Social Christians, and colonial lawyers in the ICI assumed that only the intrinsic motivation of Africans and Asians themselves could make colonial development a success. In the 1890s, the ICI’s showcase project was the Matadí-Léopoldville railway line in the Congo Free State, which successfully combined international investment and emulative development. The ICI facilitated the transcolonial recruitment of 10,000 indigenous workers for the construction by establishing rules for their employment. Although many workers died on the construction site, ICI members propagated a “soft” development that allegedly combined economic with ethical standards. Christian ICI members promoted this “ethical” development policy. Rarely, however, the ICI’s “soft” development could live up to the expectations it raised. Instead, ICI members designed colonial law and manipulated customary law to use both as a legal basis for exploitation under the guise of “soft development.”

Chapter 6 takes a close look at the watershed moment of World War II to show how Africans’ demands for better working conditions, greater political participation, and more social services pressured European nations to reform the development episteme. Economic hardship during the war intensified African vulnerability to poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Britain passed the new Colonial Development and Welfare Act (CDWA) in 1940, and France followed suit with the establishment of the Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social (the Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development) (FIDES) in 1946. Unlike pre–World War II colonial development policies that demanded self-sufficiency, these initiatives provided significant metropolitan funding for economic and social programs in Africa without the stipulation that they result in a direct return on investment. European colonial development in Africa was no longer simply investment in colonial industries; now it claimed to promote the welfare of African people. Imperial powers envisioned postwar development as a solution to growing dissent in Africa and budding anticolonial movements across the globe at the end of the war. The new colonial development policies signaled a desperate attempt to keep colonialism alive at a time when it seemed perilously out of date.

The farmer-soldier (tondenhei) system was the centrepiece of the Meiji period program to develop and populate Hokkaido. It sought to establish communities of farmer-soldiers in order to accomplish a number of pressing objectives, including the fortification of the vulnerable north, the provision of opportunities for destitute members of the former samurai class, and the establishment of settled agricultural villages in Hokkaido. Established in 1874, it facilitated the relocation of over 7,000 households to Hokkaido before its abolition in 1904. In most historical accounts of Hokkaido’s Meiji period development/colonization, the tondenhei system is given pride of place. The farmer-soldiers are commonly cast as heroic pioneers who engaged in a courageous, and ultimately successful, battle to tame the harsh northern wilderness and protect it from the designs of looming foreign encroachment. In this chapter, I evaluate the contribution of the tondenhei to development and defense. Tracing the fortunes of a large number of farmer-soldiers and their communities across I recover some of the silence on the individual experiences of farmer-soldiers and reveal a mixed record in Hokkaido’s development/colonization. If anything the tondenhei system’s main contribution was to provide a mechanism for reconciling some of the former enemies of the Meiji government.